Managing access rights which define the rights of a user equipment to access a radio cell is of high importance in wireless communication networks offering services differentiated per user. In particular, cells with small radio coverage, resulting in a high number of base stations per area unit benefit from efficient access right management. An example of a cell with limited radio coverage is a so-called femto cell for indoor private coverage but also rather conventional cells, e.g. macro cells, can benefit from efficient access right handling.
Femto cells are primarily intended to offer radio coverage for indoor applications, e.g. inside the customers premise, to a limited number of users for example to the femto cell owner and possibly also to his family members and friends, or within a small office or a mall to the office employees and to the visitors of the mall, respectively.
3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership project) TR23.830 relates to architecture aspects of femto cells and in particular of home NodeBs and home eNodeBs. As described in this document, a list of allowed user equipment identifications (e.g. international mobile subscriber identities, IMSI) may be maintained in a home NodeB for user equipments which can access the home NodeB or home eNodeB cell.
However, maintaining such a list of allowed user equipments in the home NodeB requires synchronization among different equipments of the mobile network, e.g. among different base stations and between the home NodeB and the network element providing entries into the list. The list comprises a private identification of a user equipment which allows to uniquely identify the user equipment in the RAN or Core network. The private identification of a user equipment is valid permanently (eg., IMSI). Once the private identification is retrievable to unauthorised entities or persons, security and confidentiality is degraded. Therefore usage of a temporary unique private identification is preferred (eg., TMSI).
In view of the above-described situation, there exists a need for an improved technique that efficiently enables a base station of wireless communication network to enforce granted access rights to user equipments.